"history of dictatorships that began with the withdrawal of the Roman legions in the third century. Some 23 million people, 6 million more than the population of Texas, live on a land mass about one third the size of Texas. On every side Romania is surrounded by countries in turmoil—Bulgaria to the south, Yugoslavia to the west, Hungary to the northwest, and the Soviet Union to the north and northeast. Hardship is nothing new to Romania. It is as though time stopped after World War II. Factories are lit by skylights because there aren’t enough Romanian-standard forty-watt bulbs to go around. In one village a woman said that this was the first Easter in eighteen years that her family had had eggs. “We decorated them so beautifully,” she said, tears drenching her lined face. Poverty and squalor are everywhere, from the center of Bucharest, where many of the country’s 20,000 orphans live in horrific orphanages, to the countryside where gypsies and farmers travel in ox-drawn carts as if they have just stepped out of the fifteenth century."